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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

This distribution is simply the best I have ever used, for 32 bit systems. (I have not tried the 64 yet. I installed this on a Toshiba A135 S2356 with 1GB of RAM. This laptop is a widescreen system and originally came with VISTA basic, which was promptly jettisoned. However, it has been a problem child. On Mandriva 2007, wireless would not work, not even with ndiswrapper.
Mandriva 2007, in my opinion, really was half-baked and probably should not have been released, I believe it hurt Mandriva. In frustration I installed Mepis X64, which allowed me wireless, but no sound. (Intel HDA). Once Mandriva 2008 became available and I could install it. most everything works as it should.
(Except the special media buttons and the volume control wheel. -I am sure I can tweak it and make them work if I want to expend the effort.) One additional thing to watch out for, the button that turn off the wireless turns off the light, but does not actually turn of wireless.
The OS itself is stable, solid and polished.
The menu items are reorganized and are laid out in a very logical fashion. Most all applications are right where you would expect to find them.
Hardware detection for items such as USB jumpdrives and cameras is first-class.
Bluetooth support is great as well.
3D support is absolutely awesome!
If I had one wish it would be that Mandriva prepackaged their x64 version with 32 bit libraries, so applications that do not exist for X64 (such as Adobe Flash) can be run.

In closing, I would like to repeat that this distribution is an absolute winner, I love it!

I use it since the day of the release. I'm very pleased with it. the only small thing is that I have some problems with the usage of external HDD's / usbsticks. ntfs support needs to be installed (not standard), and 'special' commands need to be executed to be able to write on them.

I have used Mandrake/Mandriva for many years and 2008 is the best yet. I am using the 64 bit version. It is no problem using 32 bit if a 64 bit program is not available. In the last year most programs have become available in a 64 bit version anyway. I have gkrellm on my desktop and a year ago it usually showed one core at a time working but now both cores are usually in use.
2008 has made real advancements in hardware detection. For some time my TV card was not detected properly but in 2008 it works fine.
One irritation though is when installing RPM's in the control center there is very limited information listed for the programs in the repositories.

Installed the 64 bit edition. All OK, except except a couple of annoyances.

Cons:

Kpowersave crashes on start up.

Finally got around to installing the 64-bit edition. All is well, except
a couple little problems. Kpowersave will crash on login. Putting a command directly in autostart will also crash. However, setting a symlink to kpowersave in the startup folder is a suitable workaround. No restricted driver for my graphics card, so graphics performance when playing some games is subpar. (32-bit had an excellent restricted driver) Wish there was a top notch OSS driver, oh well.
My conclusion still stands,even with those minor annoyances. A great OS!

UPDATE! I have installed Mandriva 2009 Powerpack on my machines.
Mandriva is continuing their winning streak. This distro is close to being perfect. Just for the record. I have recently tried a number of other distributions, but none can compare to this one.
I strongly recommend it.

Installed mandriva for two days already. Awesome except for my wireless configuration. Had tried ndiswrapper but no luck. Will try again later. Btw, i've installed mandriva one 2008 on my acer L320 (vista home premium).

I installed this on a new rig. The system board is a Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 board with a AMD 64 bit processor. 1 Gig of ram, and a 160 gig sata HD.

The Nvidia video worked out of the box, as did the audio and ethernet. I have not found any not working hardware; yet.

I havn't tried to burn anything on the LG DVD burner. I reads without any issues.

Only sofware problem to report is KSCD refuses to play an audio CD. Kaffine plays them without any difficulty. KSCD reports I don't have access permissions to /dev/cdrom and here is what is reported for /dev/cdrom.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-01-02 09:34 /dev/cdrom -&gt; hda

Got KsCd to play audio CD's. I had to change the permissions on /dev/hda to 777, and also had to change KsCd output to Arts. It now works.

I am using the 64bit version, haven't tried wireless but so far very happy with this distro, the only complaint is with the screen savers when the 3d desktop is activated ( i have an NVIDIA geforce 7300) it locks the screen but runs in a window.
Apart from this little quirk, this version of mandriva is awesome.
My hardware is: msi k9n ultra with an amd athlon64 x2 3800+ with 1 GB of ram and a 160GB SATA HDD.

Being a Linix newbie, I am very impressed with Mandriva One 2008. I downloaded the free copy, and it installed in less than a half hour. All hardware came up working, even my Linksys WUSB54G wireless adapter.

I have been using a dual boot Mandriva/Win XP Pro system for over a month now and it has performed almost flawlessly.

I have added Opera 9.25, and Picasa via downloaded RPM packages, and they installed w/o problem. I also added Avast! antivirus, which was the only one I was able to sucessfully install, after trying AVG, and ClamAV. The update process was straight forward, although I only installed the security updates for now, along with the latest versions of FireFox and Open Office.

I love thos OS! It's complete with CD/DVD burning software, a complete office suite, and plenty of options for digital photos, and music. I am just learning of all the available free software via my recently added repositories.

easy to set up, almost everything works well, lots of software packages,

Cons:

I haven't managed to get Samba working yet, but then I haven't worked at it much

This distro is very easy to configure with the control center, 3d desktop (compiz-fusion or metisse) is set up automatically if you select it, pretty much everything works flawlessly-- I prefer it to PCLinux and to all the other distros I've tried. It is very easy to locate packages for it, even some quite obscure ones, and packages almost always install (although they don't always show up in the menu) Overall a very solid distro, and compiz-fusion works beautifully-- no crashes for me yet.

I've been bouncing around for years experimenting with different Linux distributions. I started my linux journey with Mandrake 6 or something, and went from there to Fedora, Ubuntu, and a couple of others. Well I got this new laptop, a Compaq with intel dual core processor, and Windows Vista Home Premium. Several distributions would boot, but didn't pick up half my hardware. Well after a month or so of waiting on Windows Vista to finish whatever takes it so long to do every little task, I decided to go check out Mandriva. I first left when they started charging for their OS, but now there's a free version without the customer support and less included software. The Mandriva Linux 2008 One livecd picked up everything right out of the box on this almost new computer, so I did the install and have used it with no problems. Extremely stable, redhat based with access to .rpm packages, and a very sleek and stable KDE desktop environment. I recommend this OS to new and experienced Linux users alike.A few inconveniences include the fact that my little button that turns off the wireless card stays red and doesn't really turn it off, but that's not even a factor, it's just there. ; win32 codecs of course do not come in the free version so you have to get them yourself, and although it pre-set my compiz settings to the highest, I had to turn them down before my videos would display a picture. ; The install was very easy, easier than the one for Windows, which is the case with most Linux distros now. ; Ummm, I'm having trouble thinking of negative things about this OS, so just download the LiveCD and check it out for yourself, I really recommend it.

I've used Mandriva on and off for a number of years. Whilst looking for a new distro for my laptop (HP nx6110), I decided to try the latest version.
Rather than write a long and pointless review, I'll stick to the main points...
The distro is pretty a standard KDE install, which looks ok and nothing obviously special.
On the laptop, my wireless (Broadcom) refused to work. As an experienced Linux user, I spent an age trying to get it to consistently connect to the router (which was 12 inches away, on my desk during installation!). Eventually, I managed it, but not without many problems. On reboots, the wireless connection would refuse to come back up, resulting in a reinstall and reconfiguration of the whole thing. Not to mention that even trying manually, unless my router is broadcasting the SSID, I cannot get Mandriva to see or connect.
Every so often, usually during or just after some kind of configuration jobs, the keyboard would freeze, and/or the gui would die. Unable to get into the console, I ended up hard resetting the laptop a number of times. Eventually, even after installing all current updates, I simply gave up.
I have never had these kind of crashes with any distro before or since and know the laptop hardware is fine as it dual boots XP, which behaves itself. This laptop is regularly (usually every three months or so) used to distro hop and these issues are completely new. I can only conclude that they are due to bugs in the distro itself.
The instability is a worry and for me, a show-stopper. I will try again with new versions of Mandriva as I do like the distro, but hope they sort out the issues.

I am using Mandriva-2008 Free.
Any person who is a new in the field of Linux can use it for learning by the help of interactive interface provided in it.
From starting, all things has been made simple to be understandable by a layman. Only you have to sit on the front of screen and you will learn a great about Linux through graphical environment.
It can play most of the media types by default and a bundle of software has been provided with it from text editor to kernel, documentation; just need to install them.
The main fact is its flexibility.
There is a little bit where networking comes into action. I am using net through bluetooth via GPRS and it sometime show that "cannot open modem" but automatically get connected after some time by retrying the connection.
Overall it is the best one for any one A Newbie or an Advance user.